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that their farther exportation was forbidden, lest metal for the same use should be wanting at home. Somerset pretended that one bell in a steeple was sufficient for summoning the people to prayers; and the country was thus in danger of losing its best music, . . . a music, hallowed by all circumstances, which, according equally with social exultation and with solitary pensiveness, though it falls upon many an unheeding ear, never fails to find some hearts which it exhilarates, and some which it softens.

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One of the first acts of Parliament, under the new reign, had been to confer upon the King all Chantries, Free Chapels, and Colleges. Under the first title, lands or houses were bequeathed to particular churches, for maintaining priests, who should daily perform mass for the souls of the founders, and other such persons as were specified in the deed of endowment. There were forty-seven such belonging to St. Paul's. Free Chapels were separate places of worship, erected and endowed for the same purpose. The surplus revenue, after the Priest's salary was discharged, was appropriated to religious uses; either in supporting free-schools, or scholars at the Universities, or in alms. Henry's executors brought in this act: the Abbey lands had all been wasted, and without some such resource, they found themselves unable to pay his debts; and, what touched them more nearly, ... to satisfy their own pretensions. It was opposed, not only by the Popish Bishops, but by Cranmer. He was for reforming these foundations, but for preserving them till the King should come of age; not doubting, from his excellent disposition, but that he would then apply them to the best purpose, . . . that of improving the condition of the poor Clergy. For the Reformation, or rather the spoliation which accompanied it, had miserably impoverished the inferior Clergy, by transferring the impropriated tithes to lay hands. This argument was of no avail; and the Chantry lands went, . . . as the Abbey lands had gone before them.

They who divided the spoil were not content while anything remained untouched. Sir Philip Hoby recommended that all the Prebends should be converted to the King's use: and the Protector's brother, the Lord Admiral, a bold bad man, repreStrype's Cranmer, p. 266.

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sented that Bishops ought not to be troubled with temporal concerns; and that it would be right to make them surrender all their royalties and temporalities to his Majesty, and receive an honest pension of money, yearly allowed to them, for hospitality. But he received for this a memorable rebuke. The King told him, that he knew his purpose: "You have had among you," said he," the commodities of the Abbeys, which you have consumed, . . . some with superfluous apparel, some at dice and cards, and other ungracious rule. And now, you would have the Bishops' lands and revenues to abuse likewise! Set your hearts at rest: there shall no such alteration be made while I live!"

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The reckless destruction with which this violent transfer of property was accompanied, as it remains a lasting and ineffaceable reproach upon those who partook the plunder, or permitted it, so would it be a stain upon the national character, if men, when they break loose from restraint, were not everywhere the Who can call to mind, without grief and indignation, how many magnificent edifices were overthrown in this undistinguishing havoc ! . . . Malmsbury, Battle, Waltham, Malvern, Lantony, Rivaux, Fountains, Whalley, Kirkstall, Tintern, Tavistock, and so many others, the noblest works of architecture, and the most venerable monuments of antiquity, each the blessing of the surrounding country, and, collectively, the glory of the land! Glastonbury, which was the most venerable of all, even less for its undoubted age, than for the circumstances connected with its history, and which, in beauty and sublimity of structure, was equalled by few, surpassed by none, was converted by Somerset, after it had been stript and dilapidated, into a manufactory,' where refugee weavers, chiefly French and Walloons, were to set up their trade! He had obtained it from the Crown, by one of those exchanges, which were little less advantageous than a grant. One of the Popes, at King Edgar's desire, had taken this Monastery "into the bosom of the Roman Church, and the protection of the holy Apostles," and denounced a perpetual curse upon any one who should usurp, diminish, or injure its possessions. The good old historian, William of Malmsbury, when he recorded this, observed, that the denunciation had al

1 Strype's Cranmer, p. 212.

ways, till his time, been manifestly fulfilled, seeing no person had ever thus trespassed against it, without coming to disgrace by the judgement of God. By pious Protestants, as well as Papists, the Abbey lands were believed to carry with them the curse which their first donors imprecated upon all who should divert them from the purpose whereunto they were consecrated; and in no instance was this opinion more accredited than in that of the Protector Somerset.

The destruction of manuscripts was such, that Bale, who hated the Monasteries, groaned over it as a shame and reproach to the nation. Addressing King Edward upon the subject, he says, "I judge this to be true, and utter it with heaviness, that neither the Britons under the Romans and Saxons, nor yet the English people under the Danes and Normans, had ever such damage of their learned monuments, as we have seen in our times. Our posterity may well curse this wicked fact of our age, this unreasonable spoil of England's most noble antiquities." "As brokers in Long-lane," says Fuller, "when they buy an old suit, buy the linings together with the outside; so it was conceived meet that such as purchased the buildings of monasteries, should in the same grant have the libraries (the stuffing thereof) conveyed unto them: and these ignorant owners, so long as they might keep a Lieger-book or Terrier, by direction thereof to find such straggling acres as belonged to them, they cared not to preserve any other monuments." They were sold to grocers and chandlers; whole ship-loads were sent abroad to the bookbinders, that the vellum or parchment might be cut up in their trade. Covers were torn off for their brass bosses and clasps; and their contents served the ignorant and careless for waste paper. In this manner, English history sustained irreparable losses, and it is more than probable that some of the works of the ancients perished in the indiscriminate and extensive destruction.

The persons into whose hands the Abbey lands had passed, used their new property as ill as they had acquired it. The tenants were compelled to surrender their writings, by which they held estates, for two or three lives, at an easy rent, payable chiefly in produce; the rents were trebled and quadrupled, and the fines raised even in more enormous proportion, . . . sometimes

even twenty-fold. Nothing of the considerate superintendence which the Monks had exercised,... nothing of their liberal hospitality, was experienced from these Step-Lords, as Latimer, in his honest indignation, denominated them. The same spirit which converted Glastonbury into a woollen manufactory, depopulated whole domains for the purpose of converting them into sheep farms; the tenants being turned out to beg, or rob, or starve. To such an extent was this inhuman system carried, that a manifest decrease of population appeared in the Musterbooks,' which in those ages answered, though imperfectly, the purpose of a census. The most forward of the Reformers did their duty manfully, in crying aloud against this iniquity; and truths of this nature were never proclaimed more honestly than they were from the pulpit in the presence of King Edward, and of the very statesmen who were most deeply implicated in the offence.

Such oppressions drove men to despair, and produced insurrections, which, by those who looked far off for causes that lay close at hand, were imputed to the Sun in Cancer, and the Midsummer Moon. The first rising was in Devonshire. It broke out in a village, on the day when the new Liturgy was first to have been used: a tailor and a common labourer declared, for the parishioners, that they would keep the old religion as their forefathers had done: the Priest, whether willingly or not, performed mass in obedience to their demand; and owing to the indecision of the nearest magistrates, who, when they ought to have restored order by a prompt exertion of authority, parleyed, hesitated, and did nothing, the news ran from one place to another, and the country was presently in a state of rebellion. The poor simple. people, goaded as well as guided by priests of the old religion, who were as bigotted as themselves, and little better informed, put forth their demands in fifteen articles, wherein, so curiously were they misled, not one real grievance was stated. They required that all the General Councils and Decrees should be observed, and all who gainsayed them be held as heretics; that the Six Articles should be enforced; Mass performed in Latin as formerly, and no person to communicate with the Priest; the Sacrament to be hung over the high altar, and there worshipped,

1 Strype's Memorials, ii. p. 152. Bagster's edition.

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as in old time, and all who would not consent to this to be put to death like heretics; the Laity to communicate only at Easter, and then but in one kind; baptism to be administered on weekdays as well as holydays; images set up again, and old ceremonies restored; the new service to be suppressed, because it was but like a Christmas game, and the old Latin service resumed, ... the Cornish men, they said, utterly refusing to use English, because some of them understood not the English tongue; the souls in Purgatory to be prayed for by every preacher in his sermon; the English Bible to be prohibited, and all English books of Scripture, for otherwise the Clergy would not " of long time confound the heretics;" and half the Abbey and Chantry lands applied to pious purposes. The other demands were, that Car dinal Pole should be pardoned, sent for from Rome, and promoted to be of the King's Council; that two Clergymen, whom they named, should be beneficed, and sent to preach among them; that their leaders, Humphrey Arundel and the Mayor of Bodmin, should have a safe-conduct for the purpose of conferring with the King concerning the special grievances of their part of the country; and that no gentleman should have more than one servant, unless his landed estates enabled him to spend an hundred marks a year; for every hundred, they thought it reasonable he should have a man. They concluded with a protestation of loyalty: "We pray God save King Edward, for we be his, both body and goods."

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The gentlemen of the country not being able to make head against the insurgents, Sir John Russell, Lord Grey of Wilton, and Sir William Herbert, were sent with a force both of horse and foot, among whom were many foreigners, Burgundian, Italian, and Albanian; these troops having been brought over, because the majority of the nation were attached to the old faith. The King, as his father had done under like circumstances, published an address to the deluded people, reasoning with them upon their propositions, and the grounds of their rebellion. With regard to baptism, he said, they might reasonably be offended, if by his laws they might not christen their children when they were disposed, upon necessity, any day or hour in the week; but they were falsely deceived in this, as they might see by looking in the 1 Burnet, iii. p. 190.

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